where you need to protect another soldier until help can arrive. I got to the last segment, and was getting frustrated to no end because I couldn't survive long enough.

So here you have a game that tries to be pretty realistic in that you are almost always paired with a group of other soldiers that use real-life tactics (flashbanging rooms before entering, etc.) and requires you to use cover and cover fire to survive. But then it puts you in a situation where you have one

Spoiler for Hiden:

somewhat crippled

fellow soldier who sits out in the open yet can't die, and forces you to become Rambo against waves of enemies.

I wound up looking up a guide since I was getting fed up, and more often than not, the guides told you to just hide, so that is what I did - hid in a ticket booth until the reinforcements showed up. I was getting rained on with grenades, but of course no one bothered to actually come around to the door to shoot me. If a large number of players decide the best way to get through a segment is to exploit the game, that's bad design. It's not quite as cinematic, but I think COD2 did a better job of immersing you because it didn't have these kinds of slip ups.

interesting use of spoiler tags, not sure what you were hiding and what you were showing

Overall the whole game revolves around finding the trigger point that stops the waves of enemies, then mopping up the ones that already spawned and repeating until you get to the end of the game. It's fun if you don't think about the fact that that is all you are doing.

I agree though that it's bad design and trigger points like this are what really irk me in both COD4 and R6V:2

interesting use of spoiler tags, not sure what you were hiding and what you were showing

Overall the whole game revolves around finding the trigger point that stops the waves of enemies, then mopping up the ones that already spawned and repeating until you get to the end of the game. It's fun if you don't think about the fact that that is all you are doing.

I agree though that it's bad design and trigger points like this are what really irk me in both COD4 and R6V:2

These are the types of things that make me appreciate Halo 3's campaign. Each level is like a sandbox. CoD4 is great the first time through if you just roll with it. But is is ultimately just guys coming out of spawn points over and over.

The level in Bioshock where you have to escort the Little Sister ruined the game for me. All through the game they don't stay at a corpse for more than a few seconds and you end up having to protect the one that not only needs to harvest the ADAM but go through their pockets, pull out any gold fillings and then do a cavity search.

Going back quite a bit, there was Space Quest 1 where, in the very beginning, you have to win on a slot machine several times to advance in the story. seriously, moving forward hinges on a random game of chance?

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I think a lot of people also hate the controller reversal during the final boss of Beyond Good and Evil, although as it is the very last thing you do in the game and meant to be difficult, it didn't bother me that much.

Command & Conquer 3 is one that sticks out for me. Fantastic game of Nod vs. GDI...oh wait, here is the Scrin. Bleh.

If the game was GDI vs. Nod all the way through I think more people would have finished both campaigns. I know a great deal of Nod fans that haven't finished the Nod campaign because they don't want to fight the Scrin again after pushing through the GDI missions.

I think a lot of people also hate the controller reversal during the final boss of Beyond Good and Evil, although as it is the very last thing you do in the game and meant to be difficult, it didn't bother me that much.

I just turned the controller upside down for the portion of the fight that did that.

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Pausing the game to change camo and stuff was okay in Metal Gear Solid 3...but did we really need to be a nurse and bandage our broken leg if we fell from a high ledge, put some ointment on a burn, or treat a poisonous snake bite?

I thought the boss fight in Bioshock was godawful, and totally out of place.

There was an awful lot of Mass Effect that was poorly done also. Pretty much all of the sidequests and planetary exploration.

And in Rainbow 6, why do I have to target my wounded teammate to have my other teammate heal him? In fact, why do I have to tell my teammate to heal the wounded teammate in the first place. They're standing right next to each other. What's wrong with you? Can't you see the man's in pain. Instead, I gotta go find them and say, hey buddy, how about sticking a hypodermic in your friend lying on the ground right fucking next to you.

Assholes.

« Last Edit: April 08, 2008, 03:50:08 PM by IkeVandergraaf »

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The escort mission in Brute Force is one that comes to mind for me; level was far too small to be used for such a mission. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, many of the levels in Brute Force fit into the category of game ruiners.

I thought the boss fight in Bioshock was godawful, and totally out of place.

There was an awful lot of Mass Effect that was poorly done also. Pretty much all of the sidequests and planetary exploration.

And in Rainbow 6, why do I have to target my wounded teammate to have my other teammate heal him? In fact, why do I have to tell my teammate to heal the wounded teammate in the first place. They're standing right next to each other. What's wrong with you? Can't you see the man's in pain. Instead, I gotta go find them and say, hey buddy, how about sticking a hypodermic in your friend lying on the ground right fucking next to you.

Assholes.

You don't have to target the teammate to have the other one heal him, just hit up on the pad and the non-wounded guy will heal the downed one. The reason they wait until you tell them too is because they don't know if you want him to heal the guy or keep trying to kill the bad guys. Sometimes it's prudent to get him up ASAP even under fire, but other times you're better off having the AI guy provide cover fire while you heal the guy or just both of you killing the last of the badguys before healing.

The final boss in Conan was another doozy. Cheating bitch of a fighter to start with, then if you somehow managed to beat him with the limited health scattered around, you had SIX MORE CHEATING FORMS to fight through. Know how I won the fight? By trading the game in at EB and getting something else that was, you know, fun.

The latest example of this that occurs to me is Burnout: Paradise City. Get your Burnout license, then they dump about 110 events in your lap with NO FREAKIN' RESTARTS. I didn't mind having no restarts until the game got really difficult in the elite section. Divide that shit up into 25 events each to earn your Elite C, Elite B, Elite A, and Burnout Elite licenses WITH RESTARTS and I'd still be playing. With all the different routes and shortcuts, this game requires experimentation and memorization at the highest difficulty settings. Driving from the wind farm back to the baseball stadium after a narrow loss is the opposite of fun. It just adds insult to injury.

This game could have been the best Burnout ever simply by adding one menu option: RESTART EVENT. Instead, you have to recommend it with one big, glaring caveat.

P.S. I'm all for games that enforce driving around to your missions. A lot of people found fault with Mafia for that reason but I loved it. That game has a narrative and driving around lets you soak in the atmosphere. But Paradise City is pure racing without any need for that kind of enforced immersion. Bah!

Speaking of which, once you find the barriers to smash through you lose track of where shortcuts are. I stumbled onto one during a race where I, swear to God, had no clue where I was going. I get knocked off course by another racer but instead of crashing I fly off a cliff.... only to land on some kind of suspension not-a-bridge over an industrial sector. I'm still flying along assuming the race is over for me, but curious about where I'm going. I wind up coming out right near the finish line about three minutes ahead of the next closest racer. Could I find that shortcut again? Not likely. Now, if I could mark the map where it was, that would be a different story.

The escort mission in Brute Force is one that comes to mind for me; level was far too small to be used for such a mission. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, many of the levels in Brute Force fit into the category of game ruiners. every single game, ever.

Game mechanics were superb, climbing model was outstanding, graphics were excellent, combat model was neat. Then they go and make every mission a game of copy/paste doing the same thing over and over and over again. It was a colossal waste of potential.

The game's mission design should have been closer to an open world game like GTA, with each map having a variety of unique subquests you could do apart from the storyline missions.

I still had a lot of fun with the game, but it was kind of heartbreaking to enter a new city and realize you'd be doing the exact same thing you did in the last city....and the city before that.....and the city before that....

The escort mission in Brute Force is one that comes to mind for me; level was far too small to be used for such a mission. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, many of the levels in Brute Force fit into the category of game ruiners.

1) The Splinter Cell Series - Trial-and-error gameplay. I managed to struggle through the first game in the series, but playing through Splinter Cell: Double Agent just isn't fun. A few of the earlier levels were amazing, such as tapping on the ice to lure an enemy, then breaking through, pulling them into the icy water, and stabbing them in the heart, but the overwhelming level of trial-and-error necessary to get through the game is just too much for me to handle. And the terrorist headquarters levels may have been a good idea, but they're executed poorly as I loathe levels with time constraints. I want to be able to explore at my leisure, not within a certain time frame leaving little room for error. Even using a walkthrough guide isn't enough to get through the game.

2) The final boss battle with Ares in God of War - No other boss fight has ever summoned the Golden Cock Monkey with such vigor. I've never had a game make me so angry.

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OK, this is going to be a very personal peeve I'm sure, but I wish there were no boss battles in Metroid Prime games (well, I haven't played the 3rd). Exploring the world is so much fun that I hate having to spend long stretches trying to beat bosses. I'm currently on the second temple boss in Prime 2 and haven't touched the game in a few weeks because I don't feel like dealing with it. Come to think of it, I'm not really a big fan of the dark world in Prime 2.

Agreed...I played Prime I through at least 3 times, and I don't think I even made it halfway through Prime 2 before giving up on it. Prime 3 is fantastic. The boss battles in both 1 and 3 were highlights for me, so I have to disagree with you on that front.

Jak 2 and Mass Effect are the two that spring to mind. Both are a mix of awesome moments and terrible "what were they thinking?" moments. The ludicrously crowded streets in Jak 2, combined with the need to drive across the city all the time, really sapped the fun out of the excellent platforming sections. With Mass Effect, the very first sidequest you get requires you to either have an almost-maxed out Charm/Intimidate stat or fight your way through a building full of powerful biotics That's only the start of the problems with the sidequests. Jak 3 fixed the problems of Jak 2 to create an all-around amazing game, and I'm really hoping Mass Effect 2 will do likewise.

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"Why did the chicken cross the Mobius strip? To get to the same side." - The Big Bang Theory

I thought the boss fight in Bioshock was godawful, and totally out of place.

There was an awful lot of Mass Effect that was poorly done also. Pretty much all of the sidequests and planetary exploration.

And in Rainbow 6, why do I have to target my wounded teammate to have my other teammate heal him? In fact, why do I have to tell my teammate to heal the wounded teammate in the first place. They're standing right next to each other. What's wrong with you? Can't you see the man's in pain. Instead, I gotta go find them and say, hey buddy, how about sticking a hypodermic in your friend lying on the ground right fucking next to you.

Assholes.

You don't have to target the teammate to have the other one heal him, just hit up on the pad and the non-wounded guy will heal the downed one. The reason they wait until you tell them too is because they don't know if you want him to heal the guy or keep trying to kill the bad guys. Sometimes it's prudent to get him up ASAP even under fire, but other times you're better off having the AI guy provide cover fire while you heal the guy or just both of you killing the last of the badguys before healing.

Asshole

Really? Didn't know that. Well, they should have made that more obvious. Assholes.

Also the Mako in Mass Effect. There was just nothing fun about driving that fucking thing around. God that game was tedious. Except for when it was awesome.

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peterock, i urge you to try the xbox version of double agent and chaos theory. both are much better than the 360 version of DA. no headquarters missions to worry about. the core gameplay is both challenging and rewarding.

jak 2 was so bad i stopped playing it halfway through. not sure if it was some race missions or what, but it was so consistently aggravating i quit.

that mission in r6v1 where one guy must hack a laptop in the middle of a stage while 50 badguys come at you at once. your other ally is not smart enough to use the lmg the way he should and ends up getting sniped, forcing you to run into the middle of hell to save him, usually resulting in your getting killed or the hacker getting knocked out. another moment where i just said F it and uninstalled after quitting the game.

peterock, i urge you to try the xbox version of double agent and chaos theory. both are much better than the 360 version of DA. no headquarters missions to worry about. the core gameplay is both challenging and rewarding.

But do they still have similar trial-and-error gameplay elements? Many situations have only one ideal solution, and all other attempts end in sorrow. You are forced to play the same situation over and over again until you get it "right". There are rarely, if ever, any opportunites to find a different solution. There's one "right" answer, and all other choices result in death and a reload screen. Being forced to replay the same damn situation over and over again is like experiencing your own version of the film Groundhog Day, but without the humor. After numerous attempts the game just stops being fun and instead falls into an exercise in frustration.

While playing through Assassin's Creed I found it to be refreshing to not have to replay sections over and over again because the game didn't like my particular solution to the situation. I really like Splinter Cell and wish it wasn't such a difficult, frustrating game full of trial-and-error used to artificially extend game length, but each and every time I try to go back I quickly learn why I stopped playing in the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth place. And not only is the game full of trial-and-error, but it's hella tough, force-feeding you the trial-and-error experience whether you like it or not.

I'm not sure I can bring myself to buy two more games in the Splinter Cell series if they involve further variations of what I've come to despise about the series.

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